henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (11/30/88)
NASA to move the second 747 shuttle-carrier-to-be from Boeing Field to Biggs Army Airfield in Texas temporarily. The 747 is in storage, awaiting the shuttle-carrier modifications, and if it stays at Boeing Field, Boeing bills NASA for storage charges. Biggs is fairly secure and is used for some existing NASA activities. Thruster firings to move the Gstar-3 comsat, currently stranded in a somewhat-low orbit by apogee-motor failure, to Clarke orbit will be delayed until January for better sun angles. The delay will also give more time for detailed planning. USAF is once again examining the idea of using nuclear engines for the upper stages of ICBMs. Fletcher tells National Press Club that NASA needs more visibility in the White House. He says he discussed reestablishing the National Space Council with Bush in 1986; at the time Bush said "perhaps a good idea, but not now". [It became one of Bush's election promises.] The [pro-SDI] Marshall Institute claims that sophisticated discrimination methods can reliably tell the difference between warheads and decoys in space. It claims that the Delta 181 test demonstrated discrimination based on measurement of "the degree each wobbles in flight". Soviet Union reverses previous stand, endorses French call for an International Satellite Monitoring Agency to monitor arms control from space. The US opposes the idea, claiming that it would accomplish little and would inevitably become politicized. The technology-transfer paranoids in DoD are worried about it, and the US also wonders who's going to pay for the satellites. The idea dates back to 1978, but since then France, Israel, Japan, China, and Canada have started work on relevant technologies, and the US/USSR monopoly is fading fast. Many countries have at least considered using Spot and Landsat data for military purposes. Soviet Union also calls for a World Space Organization, another idea the US dislikes on the grounds that it would become politicized. In this case they may be right: in the past the Soviets have tied the idea to anti-SDI proposals, and this time they are proposing that the Krasnoyarsk radar become a major part of the WSO infrastructure!! [For those not familiar with it, the Krasnoyarsk phased-array radar is the one thing the Soviets have done that is almost certainly a violation of the ABM Treaty. It looks an awful lot like an ABM-system radar: its placement is wrong for a missile-warning or long-range- surveillance radar, and it's too big and sophisticated for anything else. The Soviets appear to be embarrassed about the whole thing, and nowadays claim it's a space-tracking radar, a claim that is generally considered ridiculous.] NASA is assessing a minor leak found in Discovery's number one engine after its landing. Engine work associated with the upcoming Atlantis launch has diverted manpower from studying the leak temporarily. The engine will probably be replaced before Discovery is used for STS-28 in February, just on general principles. The leak is in the bond line between combustion chamber and nozzle, and fixing it would require replacing the combustion chamber and rebalancing and retesting the engine. Atlantis is running behind schedule, with the processing team on a 7-day work week [uh oh, an old bad habit returns...]. One unexpected problem was the need to replace the left outboard elevon actuator last week. NASA board to complete review of the Oct 17 electrical fire in the Magellan Venus radar mapper. Damage is believed to be minor, and it is not likely to affect the late-April launch. Repairs will probably take about a week, mostly just to clean off soot and dirt. Much of the spacecraft was still in shipping covers, and major electronics packages had not yet been installed. The problem occurred when a technician inserted a connector into the wrong socket on a test battery in an electrical-system test. The fire was small and was put out within a minute with a hand extinguisher. Test procedures will be reviewed: the connectors cannot be inserted all the way into the wrong socket, but apparently they can be inserted far enough to make some contact. NASA and Space Industries Inc have completed preliminary design review of the Industrial Space Facility project. Most of the engineering work has been completed. The project is now on hold, with construction not yet started, pending customers. SII is still financially healthy and will diversify into related activities to keep itself afloat. Martin Marietta signs deal with NASA for use of NASA facilities for payload processing for Commercial Titan. NOAA predicts that metsat GOES-West will fail within a few months, putting the US back to a single Clarke-orbit metsat for at least 18 months. G-W is already past its rated lifetime, and three of the four encoder bulbs in its imaging system have already failed. Those bulbs are a notorious weak point in the GOES hardware; the new GOES-East substitutes LEDs for two of them. There is a continency plan, much like the one used three years ago when previous failures reduced NOAA to one GOES: move GOES-East westward in winter for winter storm coverage, and rely more heavily on polar-orbit images and foreign metsats. This will give barely adequate coverage of NOAA's territory except for the easternmost Caribbean islands. NOAA's headaches don't end there. The GOES-Next satellites, intended as replacements for the existing birds, are hitting huge cost overruns at Ford Aerospace. NASA is involved, since it was contract manager for NOAA for GOES-Next, and there is a finger-pointing war in progress. Ford and NASA appear to have seriously underestimated the development costs, but NOAA is not entirely blameless: it souped up the specs on the instruments, and was in too much of a hurry to permit a competitive preliminary design phase. Competition for the bid appears to have caused underbidding by both Ford and Hughes [the losing bidder], and NASA then followed over the cliff by lowering its original estimates to match. A formal investigation by the GAO and NASA's Inspector General is underway. NOAA says Ford has finally gotten the message that the situation is not acceptable, and is starting to shape up. The first G-N will be about nine months behind schedule, and will barely make its July launch date. If Ford misses the launch schedule, NOAA is liable for $20k/day in penalty charges for delaying the launch, as per the launch contract with General Dynamics. NOAA wants Ford to pay some of that if Ford is late, but as yet there is no formal agreement about that. Ford says it's all NOAA's fault, because NOAA tried to combine next-generation technology development with a tight delivery schedule. This is the first time that NOAA has actually done its own development contracting -- metsat development was NASA's job until 1982. NASA does not want to help pay for the overruns, but OMB may insist: NOAA's budget is much smaller than NASA's and much less flexible in coping with such problems, and NASA is not exactly blameless. US, USSR, Canada, and France sign long-term agreement to continue Sarsat. Other nations are likely to join in. The new agreement is seen as crucial to convincing various national and international groups that Sarsat is a stable system that can be relied on. (This is of importance because there is widespread thought about requiring Sarsat transmitters on aircraft and fishing vessels.) NOAA's Sarsat program manager says the US should strengthen its commitment by giving it a formal annual budget. The US contribution is only about $3M/yr, but it comes out of several agencies and there is no dedicated annual budget, leading to doubts about US commitment to the effort. Good sharp picture of Buran on the pad. AW&ST says that Energia's strap-on boosters appear to have been moved closer together to give adequate clearance for the orbiter's wings. [Flight International of 22 Oct, looking at the same pictures, draws some interesting conclusions about Buran. It does not appear to be a blind copy of NASA's, despite overall similarities. For one thing, based on the photos, it appears to be about 10% bigger. It may nevertheless be lighter, about 70 tons, presumably because it lacks the heavy main engines. The thermal protection looks almost identical. The shape of the wing is slightly different. The rudder is in two sections rather than one. The crew access arm connects below the cockpit, indicating a similar two-deck design. The payload-bay doors look very similar. The rear-fuselage "body flap" is similar. The reaction-control thrusters are in similar but not identical places. (And as most everyone knows, the maneuvering engines are differently places since the Soviets have the whole tail section to play with and hence have no OMS pods.)] [Flight also observes that there are now 20 Soviet cosmonauts with over 100 days in space each; the three highest US astronauts have 84.] Glavcosmos completes talks with Austria on a paid flight of an Austrian cosmonaut to Mir. This is likely to happen around the end of 1991, mostly because the Austrians won't be ready sooner. A similar mission is now being discussed with Malaysia; it could happen as early as late 1989. Europe's Intospace commercial-microgravity group is talking to the US, the USSR, and China about flying a superconductor-materials-processing payload next year. India declares Insat 1C comsat operational despite failure of half of its one solar array. The delay was due to wanting to put the bird through one eclipse [a seasonal phenomenon in Clarke orbit] to be sure that thermal management procedures were up to handling it. Only about half the communications payload will be operational, but nothing vital has been lost. Potential civilian Navstar users continue to be concerned about DoD's control over the system, and in particular about DoD's ability (on the forthcoming operational satellites, as opposed to the current semi- experimental ones) to degrade accuracy whenever it feels like it. Scott Science and Technology, a new company founded by former astronaut David Scott, is negotiating to provide in-orbit delivery of up to 3 direct-broadcast satellites for Dominion Video Satellite. SST will buy the satellites from GE, obtain insurance, buy launch services, and perform checkout in orbit before delivering to the customer. Scott says that Long March is a prime candidate for launcher. -- SunOSish, adj: requiring | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 32-bit bug numbers. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu